I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

“I like you Siri, you’re going places.” So ends Martin Scorcese’s paid homage to the iPhone’s virtual assistant. But with the introduction of Google‘s Voice Search for iOS, Siri’s shortcomings are becoming more apparent. The problem is contextual data. Google has (lots of) it and Apple has to buy it piecemeal from Yelp, WolframAlpha, Yahoo and, yes, Google.

In a test done by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster in June (and reported by MacRumors), Google accounted for 60% of Siri’s data diet:

And Apple, in its Android Rage, seems to be looking to sever ties with Google as much as possible. Kind of looks like Siri is going nowhere, Martin.

The Google Search app for iOS now has a voice icon just like its Android built-in equivalent, and it works remarkably well. This is not (yet) a personal assistant. Voice Search only searches the web at present, but with the strong likelihood that a user’s Gmail and Apps data will become searchable (by the user) as well, Google is within striking distance of Siri’s functionality.

Plus, Google has improved its user interface for certain kinds of informational results, like flight tracking and currency conversions, on mobile devices, and now displays them in a nice, big, display box at the top of the screen. These are borrowed from the “cards” in the Google Now built-in app available on the Nexus 7 tablet. And soon, if you search for a popular topic (“famous jazz composers,” for instance) the search results will be broken out in a visual carousel at the top of the page. All of this is supported by Google’s Knowledge Graph (move over Facebook), that “currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects.” And this is not a static resource, but one that is “tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.”

When all of this contextual information includes a user’s own data it approaches personal assistant status. Google Now doesn’t reschedule your appointments for you like Siri, but it does show you relevant information when you need it, based on your mail, calendars and other Google apps you are using. This is a great example of Google doing what only it can do, and what the video below shows for the Nexus 7, will soon be available for mobile devices and the desktop.

It is notable that Google has not adopted any Siri-like personas for either its Voice Search or its new Google Now services. Considering the troubles Google has with Apple over Android, it is not surprising that they are taking a different tack. Google being Google, though, they have a sure-fire Siri-killer at their disposal. If it opens the API’s for all of this to developers so that they can create custom personas on top of Voice Search, Google Now and Knowledge Graph, Siri will certainly be crowded out by a cacophony of more well-informed voices tuned to specific personality types.

But Apple is not sitting on its hands for all of this. As Daniel Eran Dilger writes on the Apple Insider blog, Google faces some roadblocks and Apple can add to them. First off, Google Now requires the latest version of Android (Jellybean 4.1) and at the moment, less than 1% of Android users have upgraded. “A full 80 percent of the active user base are suck with a version of Android 2.x, which came out 2010,” notes Dilger. “In contrast, Apple just noted that 80 percent of iOS users are running the latest iOS 5. Apple has also sold more Siri-capable iPhone 4S units than all of its previous generation of iPhone combined.”

Voice Search and the card elements from “Now” are Google’s attempts to get around that fragmentation and get the functionality in users’ hands immediately. But any apps that Google submits to the App Store for approval can be held up by Apple if it deems them too similar in functionality or design to Siri. Dilger reminds us that, “Apple previously held up approval of Google Voice for over a year, and kept Google’s Latitude friend finder app in limbo for two years as it considered the features. This left Google to rely upon web app alternatives to native titles in the App Store.”

While it is not certain that Siri will lose the race with Google, she is certainly engaged in a high-speed car chase through increasingly narrow streets.

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Woops friend, you are going to be awful embarrassed, but I just tried it. I told it to remind me to take my blue pill every Tuesday, I even gave it a specific time. And it set the reminder for me every Tuesday going forward at that time.

Looks like you should learn more about what Google Voice can do before you go making assumptions genius. People are saying GV is better than Siri because it is friend…

I have always thought that Google was better for a simple reason. Google knows more about you and me than any other organization related to the web. Every time we type something on Google Search we teach the Engine something about ourselves, and a company that knows what their customers want will do a much better job at catering to people a combination of what they need a want. Apple has clever marketing and have relied on tactics such as bragging about having no viruses, acting like their are immune when in reality the more market share Mac would hold the more it would become a target for malware. Around 2010 there was a hybrid virus on the wild able to jump from Win to Mac and Micrososft stopped it saving Mac a lot of money themselves so.. I see a lot of advertizing coming from Apple, but I don’t see enough technological breakthroughs to justify the price difference. Their ecosystem is crippling to freedom of choice, which media companies might like but are not good for the consumer. Amazon has done the same with their e-books specially readable only on the Fire, but we have to blame Apple for that, being that it’s a company that heavily advertizes and showed the rest of the market that you can control peoples choices while also limiting them.

This article is about the technicalities involved in Siri search, not the user experience. Yes Apple does have a better interface, but thats about as far as it goes. But this article makes a good point though, if Apple is divorcing itself from Google, then what is going to happen to Siri? (Thats my take on it)

“Voice Search only searches the web at present, but with the strong likelihood that a user’s Gmail and Apps data will become searchable (by the user) as well, Google is within striking distance of Siri’s functionality.”

Apple is VERY unlikely to allow Google Search a user’s Apps data, or launch apps, or any other system related tie-ins.

This is why Google Search will not be a good replacement for Siri, now or in the future.

If I only had a penny for every time I’ve read an article like this. Siri is not perfect but we’ve only been using V1 so far, which by the way uses the primary “Google Now” function of searching the web as it’s fall back option. The truth is that there has been a lot of talk about Apple-anything-killer but nobody has been able to WOW us like Apple has done so far (even jumping from an airplane with a pair of webcam quality video glasses didn’t really do the job). So until then “Google Later”!

I use a Galaxy S2 and an Ipad 3. I have to say that Google Voice is mostly junk. It takes too long, and is often wrong. The thing I find with Siri is that it is fairly intuitive, while Google Voice requires a carefully constructed command.

If my grandmom starts to use Google Voice, I will say it has arrived, until then, it has a long way to go.